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Upstream X/Wayland Developers Bash Canonical, Mir

Phoronix: Upstream X/Wayland Developers Bash Canonical, Mir

Canonical's decision to develop Mir, their own display server not derived from X11 or Wayland, hit many as a big surprise today. Canonical previously committed to Wayland in a future Ubuntu release but now it turns out that for months they have secretly been rolling their own solution behind closed doors...

Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind.

If it's true, and these drivers will be at least Wayland compatible, it can still benefit everyone. But if these going to be Mir only - Ubuntu will go the slippery road of Android, creating a sick drivers competition and Ubuntu only hardware.

The main point is Canonical didn't complain at all about Wayland, didn't contribute, didn't ask questions, didn't propose solutions, didn't object to anything, just sat there quiet and then bang - they say Wayland sucks and they "have" to use their own solution. Anyone non-brain damaged knows it's not about Wayland, it's about the NIH syndrome, and more importantly, the fact that Canonical can't control it.

The main point is Canonical didn't complain at all about Wayland, didn't contribute, didn't ask questions, didn't propose solutions, didn't object to anything, just sat there quiet and then bang - they say Wayland sucks and they "have" to use their own solution. Anyone non-brain damaged knows it's not about Wayland, it's about the NIH syndrome, and more importantly, the fact Canonical can't control it.

It seemed like they were all gung-ho about Wayland but then a few weeks back it came out that they were working on their own scheme. Seemed very surprising.

My gut is that they needed something that worked on phones / tablets now with a lot of SoC driver support so they wanted to take Android SF in and see what they could do with it.

Huh? What is happening to Ubuntu? Personally lost interest in it years ago, but still glad it promotes Linux (on the desktop), but now? This is the end, in a few years it'll be the bastard child of Linux, and then into oblivion like all the rest of once popular desktop distros... Google can pull stuff like this off with Android, because they are freaking Google, but Mr. Shuttleworth must be delusional if he thinks Canonical can do the same. Until then all they do is damage the ecosystem. Shame...

I have a feeling that desktop Linux will be slowly dying. The main DEs are severely understaffed. Without quality gnome or kde releases desktop Linux will only be used by fans only. And don't say that xfce or lxde is great, because it isnt

If it's true, and these drivers will be at least Wayland compatible, it can still benefit everyone. But if these going to be Mir only - Ubuntu will go the slippery road of Android, creating a sick drivers competition and Ubuntu only hardware.

It will, apparently, be compatible with Android binary drivers, which would give them a head start in the mobile space but may unfortunately leave them behind in the desktop market. Also, there is nothing stopping Canonical from importing code from Wayland for compatibility with that protocol if the need arises.
However, importing changes from Mir to Wayland would be impossible as Mir uses the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 to license its software and Wayland is released under the MIT license.

I have a feeling that desktop Linux will be slowly dying. The main DEs are severely understaffed. Without quality gnome or kde releases desktop Linux will only be used by fans only. And don't say that xfce or lxde is great, because it isnt

Yup. The writing was on the wall a year or two ago.

MS shot itself in the foot with Win8 but the Linux community blew off all its arms and legs in the meantime.

windows 8 could be fixed by putting back a start menu. that would take MS about a day max. it's not the same when the KDE project is severely undermanned and KDE is a half-broken mess. If the desktop environment projects suddenly died, this would spell a death sentence not just to desktop Linux usage, but also BSD/Solaris too.